David Kappele: in Toronto, ON

I thrive on leading teams and creating innovative multi-channel plans to build brand equity. My expertise and experience align sales, marketing, and the product development cycles together to deliver on the desired growth objectives. I have a proven ability to communicate with all levels of management, associates, partners, and vendors to ensure expectations are clearly defined and met. Working for a small to medium size vertically integrated company, with over 300 employees in manufacturing, wholesale, mail order, e-commerce along with a national retail presence has provided me with an extensive base of knowledge sets in marketing, sales and communications. My responsibilities have focused on full P&L ownership, turn-around objectives, and operational standards to increase deliverables. As Vice President of Sales and Marketing I was responsible for developing and coordinating all initiatives for North American wholesale division as well as overseeing the marketing department. I was responsible for the transformation from a traditional direct marketing approach (catalogue production and distribution) to a pure digital marketing approach. This involved (but was not limited to) redevelopment of a web site/ SEO, creating digital outreach campaigns (consumer and trade), privacy compliance along with building a multi-channel, multi language forward looking marketing calendar. I built a KPI program across the department ensuring responsibility for all team members. My sales (B2B) leadership grew the division into a distribution business consisting of over 4600 retailers including Cabela’s, Bass Pro, LL Bean, REI, Dicks Sporting Goods, Atmosphere (a CTC banner) along with a large core of independents. I established distributors in Australia, Japan, Korea, New Zealand and Chile. I have extensive experience in trade show management, consumer POP up events, establishing independent sales rep networks, negotiation in vendor agreements along with very strong business development skills. I established a 'data driven' decision-based system to improve upon sales preference by investing into better MIS systems and people.